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ShowYou App Aims To Change The Way You Watch Videos On The iPad

This happens to everyone: A friend posts a video on Facebook or Twitter that they think is either funny or interesting enough for you to devote five minutes of your day watching, but you don't. Later, unable to contain their giddiness, said friend hits you up and asks if you watched the video they posted earlier in the day. You say, no; they say, Man, go watch it! But, again, you don't. You don't want to sift through your timeline to find it, or search for it on whatever site they got it from. A new app called ShowYou is here to change all that.

Developed by folks at VodPod, a site that lets users share videos found all over the web with their friends, ShowYou acts as the inverse to that service. Instead of you sharing videos with friends, the app allows you to browse through videos that your friends have posted on the Net.

The interface is fiercely imaginative, with the videos arranged in an all new way. The clips are not presented in any set order, and are not laid out in a linear fashion. To see more videos, you simply swipe in any direction—up, down, left, right—to see more. You can sign into the service using Facebook or Twitter. Once logged in, it crawls through all your friends and finds videos shared from YouTube, Vimeo, or TED.

When you click to play a video, you can comment on it right in the app. Even cooler is its support for Apple's AirPlay. If you have an Apple TV, you can watch any of the videos presented in the app on your television.

Many iPad apps work to change the way we interact with media, but most fall short of the mark. It's too early to tell how ShowYou will fare, but to us, it's the most interesting thing to happen to online video since YouTube.